


Cities Under Crowns of Snow

by liketreesinnovember



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Genre: Alternate Universe - Future, Eventual Sansa/Tyrion, F/M, King in the North!Bran, Plot, Stark Siblings Co-ruling, mentions of past underage
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-07-10
Updated: 2018-08-02
Packaged: 2018-11-30 04:50:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 3
Words: 7,938
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11456358
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/liketreesinnovember/pseuds/liketreesinnovember
Summary: Winterfell faces the threat of invasion as Daenerys Targaryen and her dragons move across Westeros. Sansa rallies her remaining family around her, but unexpected ghosts come back to haunt her when a prisoner is taken.





	1. Sansa

The snow crunched under the horse’s hooves, not the soft snow of new winter, but a frozen crust that had been there for weeks, refusing to melt. Sansa sighed. She was almost there, almost home.

She had been away from Winterfell for too long. Now she was finally in sight of the Winter Town. The decorative metal plate that covered her torso, although purely ornamental and not made for fighting, was getting heavier by the moment. Underneath it, she wore gray wool embroidered with pale blue roses, in the style of the old Queens of Winter. It was a symbol of her status, just like the wretched armor. She was not a queen, but she was the Lady of Winterfell, and her duty and her heart belonged to her father’s ancestral seat, to the Starks. To the North.

She had made the journey to the Wall only half in hope that the Night’s Watch might listen to her request for aid. It only made sense. The seven kingdoms had provided the Night's Watch with a steady supply of men for decades; it was only fair that they would do the same in time of need. But It was shortly after Sansa had arrived that she saw how the black brothers kept faith. The Night’s Watch takes no part, as they were fond of saying.

Really, more than anything, she had wanted to talk to Jon. But her half brother was not there. No one knew what happened to him. There were rumors that he’d gone off with some wildling girl and turned coat, but Sansa didn’t really believe it. Men mumbled about bastard’s blood, but Jon wouldn’t just abandon them like that. Abandon the North. There had to be something else going on, but Sansa couldn’t find out what it was. Women weren’t welcome at Castle Black, even Starks. She’d felt uneasy in the nights that she had stayed there, even with her retinue of guards there to protect her. And so she’d left with no word from Jon, no men, and no closer to the answers she’d been seeking.

_Do they think that the Dragon Queen will not burn them to ash as well, and turn their wall to so much melted ice, when the time comes?_

The Dragon Queen, Daenerys Targaryen. That was the reason she’d made such an ill-fated journey. That was what everyone feared, the Queen from across the sea, Aegon the Conqueror come again. They said she was a barbarian, that she practiced blood magic and was utterly without mercy. That she came to Westeros with an army of monsters, that she rode a dragon into battle. At first Sansa did not believe, but men came north every day fleeing from the Queen’s wrath, and even the ones with their wits still about them spoke of dragons in the skies. _She is coming,_ they all said, _she is coming._ Winterfell had sent a party of men south to help defend against the invaders. Arya and Rickon had been with them.

When they entered the gates of the Winter Town, Sansa felt a rush of warmth despite the bitter cold. Even with her unnerving encounter at the Wall, the looming prospect of war from the south, and the ever-present threat of winter, her heart felt light again at the prospect of home. The smell of pine and fallen snow mixed with spices from the shops and houses, and the scent of horses as they passed the stables, reminded her sharply of her childhood. Small children bundled thickly in furs stopped their play to smile at her, to wave as she rode by. She waved and smiled back at them, as she always did, addressing them by name, asking this one how her father was, that one if his little brother’s cough had gotten any better.

It was good to know your people, Sansa remembered her father saying, all those years ago. Her brother Bran was a good Lord, but the people didn’t love him the same way they loved her. They were even a little afraid of him, and fear bred discontent. Bran was wise, and good, but he couldn’t go out so much these days, especially with the sky growing darker and the winds growing colder each day.

A few of the villagers whispered as she passed, and looked away when she tried to address them. Sansa wondered at this, but she didn’t have much time to wonder. From within the castle walls, there echoed the howling of a wolf. _Summer_ . Sansa sped her horse to a trot, anxious to be within Winterfell’s walls, and her retinue matched the pace. Then there was another howl, and another joining it. Not just one wolf, but three. _Nymeria and Shaggydog are home_.

Sansa’s horse hurried through the gates of the keep. Out in the yard, Sansa had to hold the poor mare steady as the three direwolves rushed to meet her, circling and sniffing as if welcoming the return of one of their own. Perhaps they sensed their long dead sister, Sansa thought with a sudden pang. She still felt that Lady was with her, somehow, especially when she was within the walls of Winterfell. The wolves felt it, too, she was sure of it. Even after all these years, she was sure of it.

Her manservant helped her dismount, and caught her as she nearly collapsed to the ground under the weight of the armor that she longed to be rid of. The stableman helped her unlace the leather straps, and eventually the abominable chest plate and shoulder pieces were carried off.

“Give her some space, you mangy dogs” a voice echoed across the yard as the direwolves surrounded her. Sansa looked up and saw Arya striding toward her. “That includes you, Shaggy,” her sister said, directing her gaze towards the black direwolf who was now standing on hind legs with his great forepaws resting on her shoulders and attempting to lick Sansa’s hair.

Arya embraced her sister and Sansa could smell her, boiled leather and earth. Arya was dressed in man’s clothing and her hair was a disaster, her face streaked with tiny scratches. Every time Arya went out with the men Sansa worried, but she’d gotten used to the worry at least a little bit, the reality that her sister’s place was with a sword in her hand. She was a good commander, and they needed her.

“So, what news from the Wall?” Arya asked almost immediately after they had separated from the embrace. Sansa had been dreading this confrontation. As much as she had looked forward to being back in Winterfell, she knew what Arya wanted to know.

Sansa shook her head. “They won’t help us.”

Arya bit her lip, a gesture that made her look like the child Sansa remembered. “And Jon?”

Sansa could only shake her head again.

Arya gnawed her lip, and looked down at her boots, and said nothing. After a while she spoke. “It’s not good, Sansa. We ran into Dothraki raiders. We fought them. We actually had them in a good spot, until...” Arya’s eyes widened. Sansa had never seen her sister look so frightened, not since she had returned from across the Narrow Sea, all hard edges and cool danger. “The _dragons_. I’ve seen them, flying over the battlefield, roasting men alive. It was a massacre, Sansa. There was nothing we could do but call a retreat.”

Sansa felt suddenly as if the ground had dropped out from under her. So many men dead, burned alive. Dragonfire. Daenerys Targaryen was coming, and she was bringing her dragons with her.

“There’s something else,” Arya said. “During the fighting, Shaggy managed to capture a prisoner.”

“ _Shaggy_ ?” Sansa interrupted. “ _Rickon_ was there? You let him on the battlefield!” Sansa grabbed Arya’s forearm. “How could you - “

“He’s not a child anymore, Sansa,” Arya said, coolly. “And anyway, he wouldn’t listen to me if I refused him. He can fight, Sansa, and he wants to.”

Sansa wanted to protest, but she knew that Arya was right. It would do no good, even though she still thought of Rickon as a child, even though he was barely more than a boy. They had all come back to Winterfell changed, and Rickon had come back anxious to prove himself, full of anger and fear. She was just about to ask where Rickon was now when she saw him running towards them.

He was tall. She kept marveling at this development, even though he’d been as tall the last time she’d seen him, when she’d left Winterfell for the Wall. She still remembered Rickon as the child he was when she’d left for King’s Landing all those years ago, and she half a child herself at the time. Rickon had been clinging to mother’s skirts as they’d ridden out of sight. Now he almost had the appearance of a man, handsome if wild and dark-eyed. He reminded her of stories she’d heard of her Uncle Brandon. He reminded her of that wolf of his, something snarling just below the surface.

She hugged him, standing on her toes to do it. He let the embrace go on for a moment before gently removing her arms from around his shoulders. Sansa knew that she reminded him of mother, he had told her so the first time she’d seen him since they’d been separated. Of them all, Rickon remembered their mother the least, but he perhaps missed her the most.

“Sansa, there’s something you should know.” Rickon was looking at her oddly, and Sansa glanced to Arya, then back to her brother.

“What is it?”

“The prisoner. It’s Tyrion Lannister.”

Sansa felt something drop in her stomach. _The Lannisters are all dead_ , her head protested. One of the first things the Dragon Queen had done when she had taken King’s Landing was to have those who opposed her executed. No one had seen Tyrion in so long, though, not since he’d been branded a traitor and fled to Essos. Was it possible?

“He’s loyal to Daenerys Targaryen now,” Arya said. “As loyal as the Imp can be, at least." Her sister paused. "Sansa…”

Arya’s voice trailed off. They were both looking at her. Sansa did not understand.

“I would have killed him.” Rickon said suddenly, his voice nearly a growl. “I should have let Shaggy tear his throat out. For what he did to you, sister. And I’ll kill anyone who speaks ill of your honor, I swear it.” Rickon’s hand clenched into a fist at his side.

It was then that Sansa realized what was happening. The whispers of the townsfolk. The issue of her maidenhood had not come up since the Starks had retaken Winterfell, for which Sansa had been grateful, but now it seemed with the arrival of the prisoner, her erstwhile husband, things had changed.

She felt anger rise up, unbidden and surprising in its intensity. Did they think her as fragile as a porcelain doll that would break at the slightest touch? She was tired of her maidenhead being treated as currency for her honor. Truth be told, she had given up that part of herself years ago, but not to Tyrion. Yet that was no one’s business but her own.

“Tyrion never bedded me.” The marriage had been annulled by a septon, soon after Sansa had reemerged from hiding. Tyrion had been lost, thought dead. Arya and Rickon knew that. “I am not bound to Tyrion Lannister, anymore than I am married to the stable boy.”

Arya was looking at her with surprise and a bit of admiration, and Rickon seemed chastised, like a pup with his tail between his legs. “Sansa, I am sorry, I didn’t mean - “

Sansa grasped Rickon’s hand in her own, gently uncurling his clenched fingers, and he let her. “I know that, Rickon,” she said softly. Rickon may have looked like a man grown, but he was still such a boy sometimes. They’d all had to grow up quickly, but sometimes Sansa thought that Rickon had suffered the most. “I know that you are only trying to protect me. But you must let me be my own person. I do not fear Tyrion Lannister, nor the talk of men.” That was not entirely true, but she knew that she must be brave. For Rickon, who tried so hard to be brave himself. For all of them.

 

Arya and Nymeria led Sansa through the darkness below the keep. Rickon had declined to come, and Sansa thought it best to let him alone for a while. Sansa wrapped her cloak tightly about herself as they descended into the earth.

Unlike Winterfell’s crypts, which were a comfort despite the cold and the dark, Sansa was not fond of the dungeons. The rows of cells and the shadows cast by torchlight spoke of a place of fear, a place that reminded her too much of her own time as a prisoner in King’s Landing. She had not been kept in a dungeon, true enough, but she had been a prisoner all the same, though she had had beautiful rooms and ladies in waiting to attend her every need.

It smelled down here as well, and as they went deeper into the stone maze Sansa realized what the smell was: the stench of unwashed bodies, mingled with decay and death. The smell had seeped into the stones over the years. It grew stronger as they approached the single occupied cell. Arya hefted the keys from her belt.

There was no light save for the torch that they had brought with them. At first Sansa saw nothing, but then, up against one corner, she spotted what looked like a bundle of debris. Then she realized that the thing was _moving_.

Gradually, as her eyes adjusted to the dark, she saw the head of hair, so matted with dirt - or blood - that it looked brown instead of the pale blond she remembered. But it was him. The scarred flesh across what was left of his nose still looked raw, as if fresh. The rest of him seemed little more than a pile of filthy rags. He looked like a dead thing, but every few moments a shiver passed through the small body and she could see that he was alive.

“He is hurt,” she said, without thinking. “Or sick, or - what’s wrong with him?”

Arya’s face was grim in the torchlight, and she had a hand resting on Nymeria’s head. The wolf stood at attention beside her, as if waiting for the signal to attack. “Shaggydog got him,” her sister said. “Would have killed him, probably, if Bran hadn’t stopped it. The cold will do the rest.”

Sansa’s stomach churned. She could never be used to war, not like Arya. Men dying. _Not like this, it shouldn’t be like this._ And Tyrion… She didn’t know why she should feel guilty. _He was never my husband_ , she told herself. _I owe him nothing_. If he was a Lannister, he was her enemy. And if he was working with the Targaryen Queen…

_And yet, and yet._

He had saved her, more than once, from Joffrey. Whatever else he was, he had done that. Those were days that she did not want to think about, had not until Tyrion Lannister had appeared in her life once again. But now he was the wretched one and she the one who could offer succor.

Sansa found her voice and felt like a queen. “He needs a maester. I want him brought up to the keep, his wounds tended to. We are not Boltons or butchers.” And perhaps Tyrion might even be able to tell them something of the Dragon Queen and her monsters, if he lived and if he talked. _Oh, clever girl_ , said the voice of Petyr Baelish in her head. All of her ghosts were coming back to life today, it seemed.

There was a low growl beside her.

Arya said something softly to Nymeria, and the wolf calmed. “Sansa,” she said, and Sansa detected a hint of condescension that she did not like, as if she were a child who needed things explained. “Men will talk. There are those who already say that the Lannisters have polluted your blood, that you are no true Stark.“

“And do you believe them?”

Arya hesitated a moment, stroked Nymeria’s fur. “You are my sister.” she said, with conviction. “You will always be a Stark, no matter what - “ Arya’s grey eyes darted towards the small bundle in the corner. “No matter what any of them did to you.”

“Do you trust me, Arya?” Sansa asked, then, almost afraid of what the answer would be, but she needed to hear it, needed her sister at least to be with her on this, no matter what their differences.

Arya nodded. “I do.”


	2. Tyrion

A pair of wide, yellow eyes was staring back into his own. _Wolf’s eyes,_ he realized, at the same time that he realized that he was not dead. For a moment, those eyes were the whole of his world, then gradually - with the knowledge that he was, in fact, alive - came memory.

_He was running through the snow, stumbling as his boots sank into drifts nearly up to his thighs. He could hear the thing behind him, almost imagine that he could smell its breath. All around he could hear the sounds of battle, but those seemed far away compared to the immediate threat of the thing that followed. The wolf lunged, and then there was pain._

Tyrion backed away frantically, struggling with the bedclothes. The wolf was staring at him, watching him with those terrible eyes. He heard himself cry out as he tried to put weight on his left arm and it crumpled beneath him. Pain shot up his side. He was lying on a featherbed, the wolf looking down at him. He tried to get away again, and grabbed at the sheets, at anything. He rolled and landed on the floor beside the bed with a thud, the bedclothes falling on top of him.

“He won’t hurt you,” said a voice from somewhere. Tyrion lay ungracefully on the floor in a heap with the bedclothes. “Summer is much calmer than his brother and sister.”

Before Tyrion could react, hands grasped him and hauled him up, gently, and he was deposited back onto the bed, lifted as easily as if he were a kitten. He tried to fight whoever it was... _his captors_ ...but he was so weak. He couldn’t think straight. The room... _sickroom_...was spinning before him.

“You are badly hurt. I suggest you rest.”

Tyrion did not want to rest, but he _was_ tired, and the arm he had tried to put weight on felt like liquid fire shooting up his shoulder and down his spine. A young, round-faced man wearing a maester’s chain came into view, said something Tyrion could not understand, and tucked the bedclothes around him as if he were caring for a child. Tyrion spat at him but found he couldn’t quite manage even that feat of strength and instead felt the spittle trickle down his chin.

He was so tired and nothing seemed to make sense. His head hurt. His arm throbbed. The wolf was still somewhere in the room. He could feel the beast’s yellow stare on him. He shuddered and shut his eyes, wondering if this was all just a bad dream.

This time he did not dream of wolves.

He was in the dragon pit in Meereen. As he ventured down, down, closer to the gaping mouth, he remembered a passage he had read in a book. _Forced to live in darkness, the dragons grew small. A dragon confined is a sad thing, but it is also a terrifying thing, for captivity makes them angry._

When he had met Rhaegal and Viserion, they had been abandoned by their own mother. Monsters left to stunt and rot, far away from the light. _I can understand that, too_. The veins of stone that were visible in his torchlight reminded him of years spent exploring the caves below Casterly Rock. He had felt like a child again, imagining that he was some Targaryen prince about to come face to face with one of the great beasts of legend. Except this time it was real. There really were dragons down in that pit. He had seen them. He had heard the cries first. They had known that someone was there, someone other than their mother, an interloper. He’d heard the screams growing louder, the smell of smoke and ash.

Tyrion had seen men burn alive on the Blackwater, but nothing compared to watching a dragon on the battlefield. Fire and Blood were the Targaryen words, and Daenerys Stormborn had brought both of them with her to Westeros.

While Westeros burned, however, his brother and sister’s ends had been cold.

They had found them together. They had been in father’s chambers, in the bed that he had once shared with their mother.

Jaime had left the world as he had come into it, a moment after his twin. Cersei lay on the bed, her neck blackened, and for a moment Tyrion might have seen another woman lying in her place, dark-haired and naked and not a queen at all, never a queen. He might have seen his mother, lying in her bed of blood. When Tyrion was a boy he had read about a Targaryen king with his namesake, famous for making women bleed. He wondered if his father had had a moment of prescience when he had been named. So much blood.

The blood was Jaime’s, though.

That much, it was easy to see. Jaime’s white breast was stained with red, and it trailed from the wound to his golden hand entangled in Cersei’s hair. Red and gold, Lannister colors. Even their deaths had been a secret between the two of them. It almost felt obscene to interrupt them.

They were dead, but in his dreams they were alive. They rose from the bed to condemn him for all his sins, their mouths screaming accusations while black blood poured out. It covered the floor and his boots were slick with it. Somehow it was on his hands, too, and dripping hot down his arms. He ran, and slipped and fell in the blood.

_He was running through the snow._

Tyrion woke again to darkness. His skin burned, and his body ached, and he couldn’t see. Gradually, his eyes adjusted to the lack of light, and after a time he realized that he was staring at a small rectangular window out of which moonlight shone. His body was wracked with fever. He was hot and yet he froze. He hurt everywhere and yet he felt like numb, dead weight. He no longer tried to move the arm. Instead he just lay, with his head turned toward the window, watching snowflakes drift lazily downwards.

As his eyes adjusted to the light he could get more of a sense of the room in which he lay, a modest yet beautifully furnished bedroom. _Winterfell, this is Winterfell_ . The room was similar to the one he had stayed in all those years ago, when he had made the journey north with his brother and sister and the rest of King Robert’s retinue. _All of them dead, and I’m alive_ . _I was the one who was supposed to die, the monster, the freak. Why didn’t I die?_

The snow drifted down outside his window, and the world was silent and gave no answer.

He had thought he was alone until he noticed the figure sitting in a corner of the room, just inside the left of his field of vision.

“You are healing,” the young man said, with the same soft voice he had heard earlier. Tyrion’s first instinct was that he was seeing a ghost, tall and thin and hollow-eyed. But the boy reached to light a candle on the sideboard and Tyrion could see that he was real enough.

 _Real, yet with the face of a ghost._ ‘I am unsure how I should take such a statement, from a dead boy.”

His companion smiled in the darkness. “I did die,” Brandon Stark said. “The first time, it was a miller’s boy who died in my stead, atop the walls of Winterfell. Then I followed the three eyed raven, and died there, beyond the wall. I lingered long in that cave, there at the end of the world. I watched my companions die of starvation and cold, while I was fed and clothed by darkness.” The boy’s shadowed features were pained. He looked a thousand years old, yet a boy still. Tyrion could recognize the sullen child he had met in Winterfell all those years ago who hated to be called a cripple. It had made Tyrion smile then, to recognize a bit of himself in the Stark boy.

Bran seemed to be speaking as if perhaps to some other person in the room. Tyrion’s head was still swimming and he felt as if the bed on which he lay and the floor beneath it might dissolve at any moment. The boy’s eyes looked like those of his wolf. “I saw years go by, I saw things pass that never came to be, or might be still…and then one day, I woke up and I was here. Not like the times I visited Winterfell in dreams. In those, my body is whole and my mind is...smaller. At least, I think I am truly here. I am not sure. Perhaps I am still in that cave, dreaming.”

Tyrion shivered, wondering if he himself were still dreaming. There were times when he thought that maybe he had died after all, and everything that had happened afterwards was just some dying dream.

Bran smiled, as if Tyrion had made a joke. “You once taught me that I needed to embrace what I was, what I am. I need to remember that I'm still living. It's what separates us from the enemy to the north.”

 _The south, that's where the enemy is, boy. That's where Daenerys is. She's coming for you all._ His head throbbed and his skin burned and he shut his eyes again.

When he woke again a round maester was pawing at his arm, peeling back the skin...no, unwrapping bandages. His body was damp with sweat, and sheets clung to his legs but he was bare and freezing from the waist up. The fever was still on him.

Tyrion hated maesters, and the way the man prodded him reminded him too much of his time abed after the battle of Blackwater Bay, in which Tyrion had lost most of his nose. He hated how helpless he felt, hated their potions and poultices and wrappings. When he was very young, the maester at the Rock used to put him to bed early with a potion on days when his father wanted him out of sight. He’d learned how pretend to drink the the stuff without swallowing and spit it out into his chamber pot when no one was looking.

He could not do that now, though. Even when he was left alone, he was certain that he was being watched constantly. _Know what you are, eh? I know what I am, and what I am is a prisoner, even in this pretty room._

Once, on a cold morning, colder even than the days that had preceded it, he woke and he knew that the fever had left, and even his legs seemed steady enough to hold him. His arm was wrapped in stiff bandages from the wrist to the elbow, and was still painful with sudden movements.

They had left him alone at last, but he had a feeling that if he looked, he would see guards posted at his door. He tried the door anyway and found it locked. There had to be some reason they were keeping him alive, some use they were hoping to get from him.

A fresh tunic and breeches were folded at the end of the bed, and Tyrion put them on. The breeches were long, and the tunic had obviously been made for a child, but at least the clothes were clean. He struggled a bit with the arm but eventually he managed to dress himself.

He walked to the window and peered out at the world of white below. The cursed snow was all he had seen for months, and it showed no signs of stopping. Tyrion wondered if it had looked like this on the day he was born, amidst a winter that had lasted years. He wondered if it would ever stop, if they would all eventually be covered by snow, the whole world turned white and the color and the blood leached away, as if it had never been.

A raven landed on the windowsill, shaking the snow from its black feathers, and Tyrion remembered something Bran Stark had said about ravens. He wondered if their conversation had really taken place, or if it had simply been a fever dream. “News for poor me, locked in this tower?” he said aloud to the bird, but of course the raven had no message tied to its feet.

One morning he woke and there was a stack of books on the table in the center of the room, ones that Tyrion remembered from Winterfell’s library. He wondered who had brought them.

Tyrion explored every part of the room, opening a big dusty wardrobe to find it empty, peering under the bed to find nothing but a chamber pot. Finally, he grew bored and returned to the windowsill, thumbed through the books. He’d read them all already.

The next morning there were more books, the first set having been replaced with a few titles that were new to him, stacked neatly next to a breakfast of fried bread and salted fish. Tyrion ate the breakfast and read through the books, glancing every so often at the window to see if the raven would return.

It did not return all that day, nor did Tyrion see anyone save for later that day when a servant brought him a supper of turnip stew and a flagon of wine.

“What day is it? How long have I been here?”

The girl said nothing and tried to avoid looking at him, although she could hardly help herself. No doubt she had never seen a dwarf before, let alone a famous kinslaying dwarf such as himself. She deposited the supper and left quickly, averting her wide-eyed gaze.

Tyrion ate and drank the wine greedily. It went to his head quickly, and he found himself retreating back to his sick bed. He had underestimated his own weakness.

The next day when he woke there were no new books, but a roll of parchment and ink sat waiting on the table.

 _And what am I to write_ , Tyrion thought, _my ransom to the queen?_ He had no intention of writing any such thing, but he climbed into the chair and took the parchment and quill up anyway.

The raven had returned, and at first he thought perhaps he would send a message, but then realized that even if he thought the queen might come to his rescue, there was no way the raven would get that far in the snow without being intercepted.

He studied the bird, the sleek black feathers and cruel, hooked beak. The raven met his gaze with its hollow, knowing eyes and sat with its wings folded. With a sudden thought, he picked up the quill and began to sketch.

 


	3. Sansa

The crypts beneath Winterfell formed a network of tunnels that was larger than even her father had known, weaving out into the earth like the roots of some vast tree. Tall shadows loomed all around her, barely held at bay by the pale torchlight. Now her father stood guard next to her mother and her Aunt Lyanna and her brother Robb. The stone did not do justice to the life they once had, although it had a soul of its own, it seemed to her. Whereas the dungeons always seemed oppressive to Sansa, the cold and the darkness of the crypts were somehow comforting. Cold preserved, and darkness protected what the light would destroy. Here, the dead were frozen in time forever, locked into never-changing stone.

Next to the memorials of her family, a small stone coffin sat. The stone box, and the bones inside it, seemed to call to her, even more than the statues. It was as if a piece of her lay in that box, as if it were her own bones that had been interred here. Atop the small coffin sat the stone visage of a wolf, sitting docile, at rest. The inscription beneath it bore one single word: Lady.

Sometimes the direwolves came down here, to grieve for their lost sister, buried beneath the earth, never again to run beneath the stars or sing to the moon. They curled their bodies around the tomb, as if trying to keep her warm. Sansa wondered sometimes if Lady was cold, wherever she was, but something told her that the direwolf was home here, in the chill and the dark.

Someday, her own statue would join her, and once again the direwolf would sit at her feet.

As the snow continued to fall and the winds blew fiercer every day, Sansa was so busy with the daily duties of keeping the castle fortified and making sure those in the Winter Town were provided for that she hardly thought of Tyrion at all.

A week and a half after his arrival, Maester Tarly came to see her to report that their prisoner had woken up, with the same nervousness that they all treated her now.

“His wounds are healing nicely, and he seems to be out of danger.”

“Very good,” she said, and smiled at Sam, which reassured him, she could tell. He smiled back at her. He was a kind friend, and was good to Bran, and spoke affectionately of Jon. And he seemed to be one of the only few in Winterfell who did not believe she had brought Tyrion to the keep as a spy for the enemy.

Even Arya seemed to attribute Tyrion’s presence in the castle to Sansa’s “soft heart”, although she had told Sansa that she trusted her to make the right decision.

Once she had heard that Tyrion had woken up, she had begun to question the servants who attended him. What did he do, in the tower room that now served as his cell? How did he keep himself occupied?

“The Imp is often awake during the night hours,” was the report. “Doing the gods know what.”

Sansa was not surprised to hear it. She remembered how fitfully Tyrion slept on those awful nights that they had shared a room in Maegor’s holdfast, what seemed so long ago now. She had slept poorly in those days as well, but Tyrion had told her that it was always his way. She recalled how he had often kept himself awake at night, pouring over some book or scroll. Many nights in King’s Landing when she had gone to their chamber to ready herself for bed, she would pass him in his solar, and find him sitting in the same position come morning.

She instructed the guards to send him books from Winterfell’s library, and candles, and parchment and ink as well, if he wished.

 _I know about bad dreams_ , he had said to her once.

 _What is it that haunts him at night?_   She wondered. They were all haunted by ghosts, and no doubt Tyrion had his. There were certainly enough ghosts surrounding him, if any of what men said about him was to be believed. There were rumors that he had murdered his brother and sister after coming back to Westeros, to finish the job after he had killed his father and nephew. Only Sansa knew the truth of that last part. Tyrion had no part in Joffrey’s death, no more than she did. And she was done blaming herself for the blood on others’ hands. Which did not mean she didn’t have nightmares of her own.

It was another week before she was brave enough to climb the stairs up to the tower room. She needed to speak with their Lannister prisoner. Reports reached Winterfell every day of the Dragon Queen and her monsters. She had to know what Tyrion knew.

Several of the men at arms suggested that there were faster ways of getting information out of the Imp, but Sansa forbid them from touching him. “We are not Boltons,”she reminded them sharply. There was a guard posted outside the tower room and Sansa had to insist that he wait outside for her; she wanted to speak to the prisoner alone.

Tyrion was sitting on a seat beside the window, a book in his hands. He looked up when she entered, fixing her with his odd mismatched gaze, and for a moment she felt as if she were a girl again, back in Maegor’s Holdfast.

He looked older, more weary, and pale from illness. His scarred face and strange eyes did not frighten her the way they had back then, and he seemed somehow smaller than he had. His left arm was wrapped in stiff bandages and he rested it carefully on one knee.

“Wife,” was all he said to her by way of greeting. He scanned her face for a reaction.

She met his gaze and did not falter. “I am not your wife.”

His scarred face broke into a wide grin. Then, after a moment, his expression grew serious. His eyes were impossible to read. “Aye, you’re not. In truth, you never were, and the woman who stands before me now is far from that frightened girl I wed.”

“You look much like your mother.” Tyrion pushed himself off the window seat - gingerly, favoring the arm - and stepped forward. “So tell me, Lady Stark, why am I here, and not down in the dungeons or my head on some spike?”

Sansa was unsure how she felt about his comment about her mother. What right did he have to speak of Lady Catelyn? Was he needling her on purpose? Was he giving her sympathy? Either way, she did not want it. She steeled herself and spoke. “I saved your life.”

“My life?” Tyrion snorted derisively. “My life is worth very little, I’m afraid. Much less to you.”

“You were kind to me, once.” She had meant it earnestly, though much that she knew of kindness in those days was only forced courtesy. He had been kind, though, or at least, he had tried to be. _Kindness is not a habit with us Lannisters_. But he’d stood up to Joffrey to protect her. Maybe she just wanted to clear the air between them. She was tired of feeling as if she owed anyone anything.

Tyrion gave a short, scornful laugh. “Oh, yes. I was a kind husband, wasn’t I? It was very kind of my father to wed us.”

Sansa faltered. “I know...I know your father made you. I know you didn’t want it, no more than I did. That’s what you told me. I remember. I know you didn’t want to hurt me.”

Tyrion smiled again, but there was no mirth there, just bitterness. “What I wanted?” He sneered. “Surely you are old enough to know by now, Lady Stark.” He looked up at her with his odd, mocking eyes, and for a moment she thought she saw a glimpse of something, something she remembered from King’s Landing, the way he had looked at her. She had not understood it at the time, but it had frightened her then.

He turned his face away. When he spoke again his voice was quiet, hoarse. Tyrion cradled his injured arm and did not look at her. “What I wanted was...more than you could have given me, in any case. It should not have been required of you.”

 _I was a child,_ she thought. _Men had been telling me I was beautiful since before I knew what that meant, what their words meant. I was a child and my childhood was stolen and slain._ She did not say that to Tyrion, though. Her thoughts turned back to Lady, lying dead in her tomb.

Tyrion turned to the sideboard and poured a glass of wine from a half-full decanter, drained it in one rude gulp, and poured another, turning towards the window. Sansa waited, but was met with only silence. He seemed to have decided to pretend she was no longer there.

When it became clear he had nothing left to say, she turned to leave him, but half a heartbeat later something tugged at her. She stopped at the door and turned to face him again. He still was not looking at her, and she spoke to his back.

“I saved your life because I didn’t think it was right. I didn’t hate you back then because I didn’t think it was right, what they did to you. But you’re trying very hard to make me hate you now. That’s what you want, isn’t it?”

She thought she saw his shoulders flinch at her words, ever so slightly. He did not turn towards her, only continued to gaze out the window, as if fixated on something there, but she knew he was listening.

“Well, I don’t,” she continued. “I don’t hate you.”

With that, she turned on her heel and left the room, shutting the door behind her.

The next time she came to his room, she brought with her a rectangular wooden board, its surface painted and covered in delicate carvings to match the small wooden pieces that were carved in the shapes of animals and men, and placed it on the table in the center of the room.

“Arya has been teaching me,” she said.

Tyrion climbed up onto the chair opposite her and began placing the wooden pieces. Some of the figures were strange to Sansa, such as the big one with the serpentine snout that she had learned was called an _elephant_.

“If you wish to take the dragons,” Tyrion said, “first you must learn their movements.”

Sansa nodded and began placing her own pieces. So this was how the subject was to be broached, then.

“I am not stupid, Lady Stark.” Tyrion said as he moved his elephants into place. “Nothing is ever free, not even a small life such as mine. You are not here to merely play cyvasse and discuss the past. You want to know about the dragons.”

Sansa kept her eyes on the cyvasse board. “Whatever you know of them. Their habits. Their movements. How to kill them.”

He glanced at her, surprised. “The girl I wed would definitely not have spoken of killing so lightly, as if it were merely a game.”

“It is a game. The game of thrones.” She heard Petyr Baelish’s words come out of her own mouth without hesitation as she moved her pieces across the board.

She thought he would laugh at her, but he did not. Instead he fixed her with those odd eyes, and nodded slowly.

For a while they played in silence, the only sound the movement of the pieces on the board. Tyrion played almost casually, as if he were bored by the game. His moves surprised her but he always seemed to have the upper hand.

Finally there was a lull in the game, and as she was thinking of her next move, her eyes wandered to one of the books on the table from Winterfell’s library, a book of songs. It lay open between them, to a page with a stylized illustration of a maid washing her hair in a pool of water.

Tyrion saw her looking. “Florian and Jonquil. That was your favorite, wasn't it?”

Sansa stiffened and shifted her focus back to the game. “I was only a girl back then.”

“The singers often praise the story for its romance. No one ever seems to remember it's a tragedy.”

Sansa raised an eyebrow but did not move her gaze from the cyvasse board. “And you do?” She decided to let him talk, moving her dragon into position.

“I was an ugly child with nothing but books to keep me company. ‘ _All men are fools, and all men are knights, where women are concerned_.’” His recitation was tinged with mockery but something else, as well. “What dwarf wouldn’t know such a tale?”

Sansa did not know how to reply to that. She suddenly had an image in her head of him as a boy, short fingers tracing the beautiful illustrations in the book.

“I’ve taken your dragon,” Tyrion said, reaching across the table to palm the white piece. “Death in two. You lose.”

Their meetings became somewhat regular, each time with the cyvasse table between them. Sometimes they would not talk at all, but each time Sansa felt that she had learned something. Tyrion liked to talk and sometimes he would tell her that she should have made this or that move instead, and sometimes he would even praise her for a particularly well thought-out play.

One evening, when the sun was on its way down and night came creeping after it, she came into the room and found him sitting at the table, head bent, and realized that he was asleep. Drunk, she realized, when she saw the empty decanter of wine next to his arm.

The books she had sent him were stacked haphazardly on the table, and the remaining surface was covered in scattered parchment, Sansa noted with interest.

They were drawings, one a detailed sketch of a raven perched on a bare branch, the veins of its feathers outlined with exquisite care. There were several depictions of dragons: in flight, great wings stretched, neck snaking forward, closer sketches of cruel claws or hooked-beaked faces with glistening dark eyes, spindly arched backs...and another drawing, this one a close up of a woman’s face, bent in concentration over a cyvasse board.

It was _her_ , the likeness so startling that she couldn’t help but stare.

Tyrion made a noise and she suddenly looked up, embarrassed, feeling like an intruder, but he did not wake up. His injured arm was curled underneath his head at an unusual angle, and she moved to try and shift him so he wouldn’t wake up sore.

“Don’t,” he growled, low and garbled, “touch me.” He tried to wave her away with his good arm.

With great effort he lifted himself from the chair, feet unsteady and eyes fixed on the floor. He pushed himself up and took a few steps, then collapsed.

She caught him and put her hands under his arms to help lift him up, and this time he did not protest. He leaned heavily on her as they made their way over to the bed, and when he was close enough he nearly fell into it. She stretched out his legs atop the bedclothes and began to gently ease off his boots. He turned his face away from her.

“The eyes,” he slurred suddenly.

“What?” Sansa asked, worried that there was something wrong with his eyes.

“That's where they're weakest.”

It was only after she had left him that she realized what he meant.


End file.
